Reconciling rigour and impact by collaborative research design: study of teacher agency

ABSTRACT

This paper illustrates a new way of working collaboratively on the development of a methodology for studying teacher agency for social justice. Increasing emphasis of impact on change as a purpose of social research raises questions about appropriate research designs. Large-scale quantitative research framed within externally set parameters has often been criticised for its limited potential for capturing the contexts and impacting change, while smaller, locally embedded, mostly qualitative inquiries have been questioned on the grounds of their limited generalizability and sometimes compromising research rigour. New ways of working collaboratively are increasingly explored as a way of reconciling research rigour and impact. The paper presents the procedures for designing a study that is both methodologically rigorous and potentially impactful. Twelve researchers, practitioners and policy-makers in Scotland were extensively involved in designing a mixed-method study of teacher agency for social justice. The Critical Communicative Methodology was employed to establish egalitarian dialogue between researchers and practitioners. The procedures and the resulting research tools can be used in future studies, including large-scale quantitative analysis. The paper discusses the challenges of ownership, choice of methods, and knowledge transfer, that need to be addressed in these ways of working.

KEYWORDS:

• Participative research design
• mixed methods
• research impact
• teacher agency
• social justice

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my colleagues Lani Florian, Gillean McCluskey and Lena Bahou, and the anonymous reviewers, for the helpful comments to the earlier versions of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. An example, of this is a tension between the parameters set by the Office for Standards in Education in England (Ofsted) and the questioning of these parameters by the professionals. Ofsted's inspection targets have been described by teachers as ‘leaving no room for the kind of human values that were once at the centre of what teachers did’ (Guardian, March 15, 2014, p. 33). Another example is a letter of a Primary School Head teacher to her pupils accompanying the information about their test results, in which she explains that ‘the people who create these tests and score them do not know each of you – the way your teachers do, the way I hope to, and certainly not the way your families do  …  ’ (Telegraph, July 5, 2014, retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10969735/Primary-school-headteachers-inspirational-letter-to-pupils-goes-viral.html on October 23, 2014).

2. In the Scottish Education policy and the new Professional Standards, teachers are actively encouraged to take part in research and enquiry, while the potential for impact is gaining weight as part of the research evaluation criteria by the UK Research Council.

3. The General Teaching Council for Scotland, as the independent professional body which promotes and regulates the teaching profession in Scotland